November 1, 2017 at 6:15 PM
Ornge District 344 has been operating with an expired collective agreement since October 31st, 2015. After several months, we have finally received from the Arbitrator
Tom Hodges his interest award that takes effect on November 1st, 2017.
We certainly are not pleased with certain aspects of the award; the union used all resources which included the Unifor National Research department and our legal counsel. We are disappointed that in his decision the Arbitrator did not share the same views as Unifor, and as a result, there are significant changes to Article 26. The award addresses some issues, but not all, for those outstanding issues that have not been dealt with the language remains status quo. There are some monetary gains to Hours Work and Overtime under Article 26:
Wage Increases:
- Effective November 1st, 2015 1.5%
- Effective November 1st, 2016 1.6%
- Effective November 1st,2017 1.6%
- The above results are a total increase of 4.7 % increase (3.1% of which is retroactive)
The bargaining process has been very difficult and at times adversarial throughout the past two years, as the Company has been driving to implement unilateral work rule changes such as: hours of work, scheduling, vacation accrual and shift exchanges.
The Bargaining Committee will be meeting internally on November 15 & 16, 2017, to finalize the necessary Letter of Understanding (LOU) details for an initial study period prior to implementation of permanent changes to the collective agreement (please refer to page 20 of the award).
We plan to meet with the Company on November 17, 2017.
The committee would like to thank the members of Ornge for their support during this process. We will keep you informed with any further developments. Please ensure that you have subscribed to Unifor 2002’s e-news service at
www.unifor2002.org
Our solidarity equals our success.
For more information, please contact:
Ashley Watkins, Assistant to the Local President
[email protected]
Please click here to download a PDF copy of Award of Interest & Appendix:
/resources/UNF/PDF/17-11-01_Unifor-Ornge-arb-app.pdf
Please click here to download PDF copy of the Ornge Language Agreement:
/resources/UNF/PDF/17-11-01_Unifor-Ornge-doc.pdf